Shriek of the Mutilated 1974

On Boot Island, Professor Ernst Prell, Alan Brock a seasoned Yeti investigator, leads four graduate students—Keith Henshaw, Karen Hunter, Tom Nash, and Lynn Kelly—into the remote mountains. The night before the expedition, Prell invites Keith to dinner, where they sample an exotic dish known as gin sung, a flavor as strange as the journey ahead. The off-campus party that follows brings a chilling rumor: Spencer Ste. Claire, a former student played by Tom Grail, tells everyone the story of Prell’s last expedition, a tale in which only the professor and the former pupil survived. The mood shifts quickly from campfire bravado to brutal reality as Spencer’s own night ends in tragedy—he slits his wife’s throat, and in a cascading reversal, his wife drowns him with a toaster in the bathtub.

dawn on Boot Island, Prell travels with his four students to a secluded outpost where Dr. Karl Werner, Tawm Ellis, has set up residence with a mute Native American manservant named Laughing Crow, Ivan Agar. Werner claims he has witnessed the Yeti and theorizes that the creature might have been stranded on the island after a spring melt. The group shares another meal of gin sung and later drift to sleep as Tom Nash’s song about the Yeti echoes softly in the house.

The following day, the four students begin their trek into the forest. Tom Nash, eager to prove himself, slips away to go hunting and is suddenly slain by the Yeti. The search for Tom yields a grim clue—the next morning Karen Hunter discovers only Tom’s rifle and a severed leg, sending a chill through the camp. Lynn Kelly, increasingly unsettled by what she glimpses in Werner’s greenhouse, races into the woods and is killed by the same unseen hunter. With the phone out of order, the group scrambles to make sense of the danger. Prell proposes using Tom’s leg as bait to lure the creature into a trap, a plan that temporarily succeeds but ends when the Yeti escapes with the leg, leaving Prell bruised but eager to try again.

Desperate, Prell decides to use Lynn’s body as bait. Karen catches glimpses of Tom’s remains in the greenhouse and faints, only to awaken to Prell insisting it must have been a nightmare. Refusing to let fear rule, Karen agrees to help by taking photographs, on condition that everyone leaves the island once the trap is sprung. The team ties Lynn to a tree and prepares for a final feed on the bait: the Yeti appears, and Keith tracks its approach by the heartbeat he believes he hears—only to realize the heartbeat is emanating from a hidden speaker, and he is knocked unconscious.

Back at the house, Laughing Crow quietly listens to a heartbeat recording, while a deeper truth moves behind the smiles of the island’s hosts. Prell and Werner reveal their true allegiance: they are members of a cannibalistic cult that uses the Yeti ruse to lure victims to harvests. The “Yeti” is Werner in disguise, and the danger is closer than anyone imagined. As Keith lies unconscious, Karen wakes to the horrifying sight of the Yeti racing toward the house. She flees into a bathroom and dies of fright, trapped by the monster’s approach.

Keith regains consciousness and edges toward an escape in a battered van, but his escape is thwarted when the vehicle becomes mired in mud near the party’s funeral procession. He manages to flag down a policeman, who returns him to the house, only to reveal that he, too, is a cannibal. Prell and Werner toast their long-running scheme to collect corpses, revealing that the “gin sung” Keith consumed was, in fact, human flesh. They invite Keith to join their cult, dragging in Karen’s body as Laughing Crow raises an electric carving knife. The chilling question hangs in the air as the final moment arrives.

Mr. Henshaw—white meat or dark?